In response to How to make an awesome Social Media News Release, Jonathan Rick asked me, “Isn’t this essentially the same thing that Pitch Engine offers?” Jason Kintzler then added, “Yes Jonathan, exactly! Did I mention you can do it all for free?!” (See Socialmedia.biz‘s earlier writeup on PitchEngine: A social PR platform for the new era.)

Well, my response is the topic of this post today: “The article is only about the what and why of the Social Media News Release and not the how. Pitch Engine is a how!” I then added, “Pitch Engine doesn’t take away the work: writing/collecting compelling copy and assets. You do that work” and then “Our SMNR is just a platform and structure. 90% of one’s time should be spent writing amazing content” and then, finally, “Installing WordPress, an amazing platform, does not an amazing blog make; Pitch Engine is amazing but content is king”

So, let me explain. Pitch Engine and WordPress are best-of-breed application platforms that make creating a Social Media Release and Blog seamless, removing the technology hurdle from the process. Those are good things, to be sure. However, after re-reading my SMNR post, I was reminded that it wasn’t about technology at all, it was about the collecting and presenting of relevant assets, copy, images, and videos; it was about organizing and branding an ease-of-use “steal all this content, blogger, and please post on your blog” microsite.

In fact, I made a point of showing how one doesn’t even need to spend all your time installing WordPress or some other database-backed website or web app — one can hack together a very valuable SMNR with just the most basic HTML, an inexpensive hosting plan, and a $12/year domain from a domain name registrar.

Why humanity trumps technology

It’s not about the technology, people! Hire and train people based on their ability to write and their ability to connect and engage people — who like people and care about personal, human, relationships. Signing up for Pitch Engine won’t write your SMNR for you, creating a profile on Twitter doesn’t make you an influencer, and installing WordPress doesn’t put you in the AdAge Power 150 or Technorati’s Top 100. These are all essential steps, but they’re no panacea.

If you’re spending more money on tech than talent, don’t. If you’re intimidated by technology, don’t be. If you think that Social Networking and Social Media is about apps and sites and smart phones and Twitter and Facebook and Google+, then you need to get past that and remember that it’s about people. Real fleash-and-blood folks who hunger to connect and relate. Yes, with each other, but also with you and your brand, products, and services.

Pitch Engine’s job is to make Social Media Release-making as easy-as-possible, tech-free, as possible. And they do an amazing job of it. The same goes for WordPress and Facebook and Twitter. If an app doesn’t make it easier for you to connect with other people, the app doesn’t work. At the end of the day, all these web applications are top-drawer, but they just make it easier — effortless — to do your job. They do not do your job for you and they often make folks lazier, more careless, and less concise. They tend to be enablers, enabling bad grammar, poor spelling, and just good enough editing. People should always write as though going to press and being printed on paper instead of just assuming you can always edit it later.

If you’re intimidated by technology, that’s OK. Social Media News Releases and Blogger Pitch Emails are more about the quality, simplicity, efficiency, and targeting of the writing, structure, and presentation of the page. Some of the most popular blogs online are Blogger and MySpace blogs, even though there are more sophisticated platforms. Why? Because what it is to be a blogger is to be a writer and not a technologist or programer. The same thing with digital PR and social media marketing. The most effective marketing campaigns combine the ability to write clear, compelling copy; understanding the target audience and their associated wants, needs, desires, and hunger; and knowing where the sweet spot in the market is — it is not about the technology. The tech is a necessary evil that must be transcended in order to ensure that the messaging is able to seamlessly reach the market without barrier.

Reporters don’t need to know how to run a printing press, news anchors don’t need to understand how a picture makes its way, as if my magic, to my LCD HDTV, and radio hosts surely don’t need to go out to get their Ham Radio License. And you don’t need to become an iOS developer, a web application developer, or a CSS guru, either.

Too many people in this space get stuck behind the technology barrier. They spend all their budgets on building the perfect web application, the best Facebook App, and on graphic design and architecture, leaving very little if anything on the best writers and the best marketers. Don’t get stuck in that trap.

Your social media presence, digital PR strategy, and social media marketing campaigns are only as good as your writers, marketers, PR professionals, community managers, designers, and creatives — the artisans — and not on the technologies — the tools. When I teach young college marketing and PR students in their communication schools, I remind them every day that all the things they’re learning in class, though possibly dated and old school, are still relevant because human nature is human nature and people are people and technological platforms are ephemeral and fleeting.

Learn the tools, surely, but don’t become obsessed with them. Shine the spotlight where it matters: people. Via Marketing Conversation via Socialmedia.biz via Biznology.

Related articles

• Social media success demands talent above technology (socialmedia.biz)
• Social media success demands talent above technology (biznology.com)
• How to make awesome Social Media News Releases (chrisabraham.com)
• Detailed analysis of the perfect blogger pitch (socialmedia.biz)
• The Social Media News Release explained in detail (socialmedia.biz)
• Inside a Social Media News Release (biznology.com)
• WordPress 2.5 – So exciting I can hardly contain myself… (theresabloginmysoup.com)
• How to write an irresistible blogger pitch email (chrisabraham.com)
• 5 Types of Sites You Can Build With WordPress (thetechscoop.net)
• How To: Add Customer Reviews To WordPress (wpjedi.com)

Last week I dissected a blogger outreach pitch email line-by-line in A detailed analysis of a perfect blogger pitchas a way of proving that no matter how brief and conversational one of Abraham Harrison‘s blogger pitches may appear at first blush, the effortlessness takes a lot of work and the time of three senior agents. Today I plan to go through, line by line, a site we create to support all of our blogger outreach campaigns. You can call it a Social Media News Release (SMNR) or a microsite, a resource site, or a fact sheet. To those of you who are in communications, you’ll recognize the structural similarity between it and a traditional news release or press release.

To the right, you’ll see, scrolling down most of this article, a full-length screen capture of the SMNR we produced for a launch campaign that we did for the first iPad tablet-only daily newspaper, The Daily. I am using this SMNR because we’re particularly proud of it, and you can explore it In Real Life (IRL) over at thedaily-newsrelease.com.

As I am sure you will notice right away, this SMNR — and all of our SMNRs — is a flat-file, traditional Web page. You’ll also notice that it scrolls and scrolls and scrolls.

No, we didn’t do this because we’re not good coders and don’t understand database-backed web applications like WordPress or Drupal. I have been developing Web applications since they were Perl CGI scripts, into PHP, then into Python-based Zope, and even Ruby on Rails.

We’re building our SMNRs on flat-file, scrollable, single-page Web pages because of human nature: people tend to click away from where we want them to be. We want them to be on-topic, on-target, and really considering the act of blogging on behalf of our clients. In this case, The Daily.

We use old-fashioned HTML standbys such as HTML anchors, allowing us to link within the same page. We don’t want people to miss anything and we don’t want people to get lost in a maze of pages.

We also use flat-file HTML on an Linux-variant Apache install because we tend to reach out to thousands of bloggers at a time — upwards of 8,000 — and we don’t want a database-backed website to get bogged down by a potentially heavy, all-at-once stampede of traffic. Flat-file pages tend to serve faster and more reliably because they’re generally much less resource-intensive.

What we did for The Daily, section by section

Let me go through the SMNR we created for The Daily, section by section, so that I can explain. Long story short:

If we can’t get someone we send an email-based blogger pitch to to post something within five-minutes of opening our email, then we’ve lost him. If it isn’t as easy as pie and as clear as crystal, then we might get nothing. If it looks like it’ll take six minutes instead of five, we’re lucky if we get a tweet or a post to a Facebook Wall. More about that later.

The banner

The banner is simply a quick, attractive “splash.” It’s always above the fold and needs to convey, in a single glance, what’s up and why we didn’t, in fact, waste the blogger’s time. The banner is useless but essential. It allows the client to clearly, as though in summary or abstract, convey the entire message of the campaign both visually and textually. Carefully selected choice slogans, logos, screen shots, and photos go in the banner. However, since it isn’t really possible to “steal” anything from the banner, all the content found in the banner should be replicated somewhere else deeper in the SMNR.

The banner may just seem like bling or flair but it’s is really the single opportunity the PR professional or publicist has to sink the hook, to build the resonance and excitement and to activate the passion required to encourage bloggers to spend their valuable time and finite energy on doing something for me and my clients for free.

One caveat, however, is to make sure the banner isn’t too tall that it blocks out the QuickLinks, below, or seems just like an advert or splash page instead of what it is, a multimedia press release rife with important, objective blog fodder.

The QuickLinks

OK, that’s rather hard to see, so I will make it a bit larger below so that you can see what I am talking about.

That’s better. Well, the QuickLink row is essential because it might be the only interactive part of the SMNR that’s above the fold for some viewers, especially those who are still running 640 x 480 or 800 x 600 screens. (Don’t roll your eyes about the small screen size — there are still millions of folks worldwide who are running small monitors, large font sizes, and also dial-up modems, not your big 2560 x 1440 resolution, double-screened 27″ LCD computer displays. You should work with and understand everyone and design to your lowest common-technology denominator.

So, the QuickLinks are a short-cut to what the blogger wants. These links don’t go anywhere off-page, but, rather, just link down to somewhere much further down on the single page.

And like I said, if we don’t do everything to make it as easy as possible to allow the blogger to search, discover, collect, and report on what we’re pitching, then we’re risking losing them.

The video introduction and the social network sharing

This is a two-parter. Obviously, the commercial that goes with the introduction of the then newly launched iPad-only daily news site, The Daily, is the main thing we wanted to promote. A no-brainer.

More importantly is what I circled in red, the “Share This” embed with the easy-to-share-to-Twitter-Facebook-Yahoo!-Etc. buttons. We never used to add this to our Social Media News Releases. Why? Well, we were afraid that if we did, bloggers would share on social media and social network and with either their Facebook or Twitter friends and followers instead of posting it on their blogs.

The truth is, the SMNR is all about making everything as easy for the blogger as they need it to be. Folks who feel the need to feed the maw of their always-hungry 24/7/365 blog, will always blog (and often then tweet and Facebook their post), and the folks who are interested enough but don’t have the time or interest in the topic or promotion or don’t feel like their blog is the right place for the news we’re pitching won’t blog no matter how much we may well disagree.

So, popping that little “Share This” array of buttons has quadrupled the number of earned media mentions that we get from folks who wouldn’t have blogged our stuff, our news, our clients, anyway — they are just interested enough to throw us a bone and share the Daily with their followers and friends.

The news

The news section is the most important part of the SMNR. Because there’s lots of great stuff to steal. Consider our Social Media News Releases to be one-page versions of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book — which is to say that once we have appealed to a blogger enough that she has opened our email, read our pitch, maybe emailed us, clicked through to the SMNR, scrolled past the banner, the QuickLinks, and ignored the Share This buttons, we want the blogger to have to do as little additional work as humanly possible.

We also post as many photos, illustrations, screen shots, and logos as we can into each SMNR, inline, so that a blogger can easily copy-and-paste each image into the blog post and not need to download and then upload. We act as the host, happy to sponsor the image hosting to the SMNR. As many of these as we can because we never know which one resonates with each blogger.

So, we pre-link all the items in the bullet-list with text links to the daily. We link the phrase The Daily any and every time it comes up in the list. This will appall SEO gurus who think I am an ignoramus who doesn’t know Search. I am an expert in search and my SMNRs are not Google-bait, they’re blogger-bait. We actually do not want our SMNRs to start competing with our clients’ sites — and they used to — but if we mess up all the delicate Google balance, then hopefully our SMNRs will not show up in the top-ten on Google, which is often quite challenging since most sites are absolutely terrible.

Actually, recently, we have had clients who have wanted to optimize their SMNR for search, but then you put the onus of linking, textually, on the shoulders of the bloggers, many of whom are not experts in search or HTML. So, we make sure that almost every single link has one linked textual on The Daily, just to make sure that every potential news item that a blogger might want to copy-and-paste onto his blog includes a link.

We never know what the blogger will or won’t steal, we don’t know how much or how little the blogger will copy, paste, then blockquote into their blog. Some bloggers go full-text, blockquoted, and then wrap the copy that we wrote in a bit of introduction and a parting shot into a blog-post sandwich where the copy, exactly as we wrote it, is the meat.

OK, you may have noticed that the page is pretty long. It requires quite a lot of scrolling, right? Well, remember how brief, concise, and minimal the blogger email pitch was? Well, the pitch might be laser-focused but the SMNR is everything but the kitchen sink. As many diverse and random and seemingly extraneous content and assets as we can find and collect we put into the SMNRs.

Those of you who have ever spoken to me about this before might want to jump ahead. I have an analogy for you. If you think of the Sunday paper and all those coupons, think of our email blogger pitch as a coupon for a big-screen TV at hhgregg.

If we can get that person who’s browsing the Sunday Post to cut out the coupon — already a huge task, to say nothing of even buying a paper, reading the paper, and braving the coupon section — and then pocket the coupon, get in the car, and drive to the store, once that guy gets to the store, he’s generally committed to doing something. While we’re pitching the TV, we’re just happy if that consumer ends up spending an equal sum on something — anything — else, just so long as it’s with hhgregg.

Same thing with an SMNR. The email pitch is the coupon selling a particular thing — the launch of the iPad app — and the SMNR is the big box store offering loads of other things, including bios, and other content. In the case of the Daily SMNR, a blogger may well come in to look at the offer to download and use the iPad app or to share the video with the readers of her blog but may report, instead, on Daily Editor in Chief, Jesse Angelo, who left the New York Post for a position with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

To me, it really doesn’t matter what news from the SMNR the blogger reports, it just matter that the blogger takes time out of her busy, busy, day to spend some time writing about our clients, for free. We really always remember that we’re not entitled to anybody’s time, especially if we’re not paying for it. No matter what, every mention is a gracious courtesy.

Multimedia elements and the essential embed code

I always tell everybody that only 1% of all bloggers have media, communications, or public relations experience. Full stop. Even fewer of them are HTML gurus. Nothing can be assumed. I am not recommending pablum. I am not saying that we have to dumb down for the bloggers, it’s just that they speak a different language from ours in PR. We don’t share lingua francas. So, we always go out of our way to make sure everything is as simple and self-explanatory as possible without ever insulting the blogger.

In the above case, we always make sure that embed codes are included whenever any video is included — if we ever want to see it embedded inline in a blog post. We had an embed code in the first video at the top of the SMNR but it was deleted by the client. Even if our blogger knows how to find the embed code himself, we really don’t want him to leave the site to go hunt it down over at YouTube, as I explained earlier. We don’t want people to ever click away.

So, we include all embed code at a height and width that is optimal for most blogs, in this case 480 pixels wide. If the blogger is sophisticated enough to want a 853 x 480 video, he can go get that, we’re just making it as easy as possible to make the entire process take less than five minutes from the opening of the email to the clicking on Publish.

Social media and tags

The “Share This” buttons at the top of the SMNR are promotional. They don’t reference the client-owned Social Media properties. It is essential to make sure that we offer up everything and anything to the blogger’s consideration.

Finally, to make it as easy as humanly possible for everyone, we include a string of comma-separated topical keywords that each blogger can easily copy-and-paste into the “post tags” portion of your blogging platform.

Yes, I know. this SMNR has everything including the kitchen sink. Not true. It gets worse. If you explore the SMNR for Habitat for Humanity’s World Habitat Day the SMNR we did for the US Olympic Committee we made for the Winter Olympics in Canada, or one of the SMNRs for the Fresh Air Fund, you’ll see that there are all sort of other things such as banners with embed codes and additional videos and all sorts of other assets — really the kitchen sink, in many cases.

Favicon, header title, and meta description

One last thing that I want to discuss before we end this helluva long post is about fit and finish. Too often “single use” sites like this just don’t get the love they deserve. Make sure you take some time to create a nice “Favicon” aka favorites icon, shortcut icon, website icon, URL icon and bookmark icon. Also, please take the time required to create a strong and descriptive Metatag Title and Description tag as well.

<title>Introducing The Daily - Facts and Resources</title>
<meta name="description" content="The Daily facts and resources page. Introducing The Daily The first digital daily news publication built from scratch for the iPad by some of the best in the business to bring you information that's smart, attractive, and entertaining.">
<meta name="keywords" content="the daily facts, the daily resources, the daily facts and resources, the daily, thedaily.com, rupert murdoch, news corp, apple, mac, ipad, ipod, iphone, iphone 3g, iphone 3gs, iphone 4, steve jobs, macbook, macintosh, mackbook air, ipod nano, new iphone, ipod touch, apps, ipad apps, iphone apps, mac rumors, ipad reviews, apple technology, apple news, ipad news, iphone news, tech, technology, geek, geek news, gadgets, new gadgets, new technology">

Why? Why is it even worth the extra time to go back into the engine room and tool with the Meta Data? Well, the HTML Title tag directly contributes to what people see when they either bookmark your page, what they see in a browser tab, or what they see in the Title Bar. Easy-peasy. A real no-brainer. Also, despite what anyone at SEOMoz thinks, meta tags are still important and here’s why:

You’ll notice that all the text in the search result that comes up when your search serves up thedaily-newsrelease.com as a result is content that Google didn’t so much have to find or scrap; rather, it simply serves up the text directly from the Title we wrote and also the Meta Description we also wrote in the form of the search result headline and description.

I hope the previous 2,500 words have done a pretty good job of explaining why we at Abraham Harrison insist on producing a proper, well-produced, well-branded Social Media News Release (SMNR) — both philosophically, practically, and psychologically.

And because I really don’t know everything, please feel free to comment, contribute, share, and ask any questions you may well still have about the process, the evolution, and any technical details you might be unclear about or I have failed to cover. Thank you for your amazing attention span! Via Marketing Conversation via Biznology via Socialmedia.biz.

Related articles

• The Social Media News Release explained in detail (socialmedia.biz)
• Inside a Social Media News Release (biznology.com)
• How to write an irresistible blogger pitch email (chrisabraham.com)
• Why Using the Social Media News Release is a Big Mistake (hubspot.com)
• Authentic Internet inbound marketing the way God intended (chrisabraham.com)
• Detailed analysis of the perfect blogger pitch (socialmedia.biz)
• The art of writing the perfect blogger pitch (biznology.com)
• Study Shows Social Media Releases Are Less Effective Than Traditional Press Releases (hubspot.com)
• Online newsroooms should go social (econsultancy.com)
• Flipboard, Smaller and Smarter, Launches on iPhone (prnewswire.com)
• Inbound marketing the way nature intended (socialmedia.biz)

Go the Fuck to Sleep AKA Go the F**k to Sleep AKA Go the F to Sleep is #1 on Amazon based on a bit of a laugh, some Facebook time, a Facebook Page, a PDF that got “out of control” and went viral, and lots and lots of indiscriminate email forwarding between friends.  Now this is the power of Social Media! Here’s some info from Amazon:

Go the Fuck to Sleep is a bedtime book for parents who live in the real world, where a few snoozing kitties and cutesy rhymes don’t always send a toddler sailing blissfully off to dreamland. Profane, affectionate, and radically honest, California Book Award-winning author Adam Mansbach’s verses perfectly capture the familiar–and unspoken–tribulations of putting your little angel down for the night. In the process, they open up a conversation about parenting, granting us permission to admit our frustrations, and laugh at their absurdity.With illustrations by Ricardo Cortes, Go the Fuck to Sleep is beautiful, subversive, and pants-wettingly funny–a book for parents new, old, and expectant. You probably should not read it to your children.

Here’s some buzz happening madly about Go the F**k to Sleep:

• Go the Fuck to Sleep bedtime book is hit with parents
• Go the bleep to sleep, dad writes in best-seller
• Frustrated dad’s Facebook status now No. 1 on Amazon
• ‘Go the F— to Sleep’: Children’s Book Satire Becomes Viral Hit on Amazon
• How the Success of “Go the F— to Sleep” Discredits Copy Protection
• The Fruits of ‘Piracy’ as Marketing
• Adam Mansbach’s Go the F–k to Sleep number one on Amazon best-seller list
• Book parody by tired dad urging kid to ‘Go the (Bleep) to Sleep’ sells 100,000 pre-orders
• Children’s book for adults is a surprise best seller
• Go the bleep to sleep, dad writes in best-seller
• ‘Go the F**k to Sleep,’ gets viral all the way to Amazon’s No. 1 best-seller
• Bedtime story: Go the bleep to sleep
• Fox 2000 to Adapt Go the F**k to Sleep
• Fox 2000 nabs ‘Go the F**k to Sleep’
• New book ‘Go the F@#k to sleep’ expresses bedtime frustration
• Children, please go to sleep
• Finally Someone Says to Children: “Go the Fuck to Sleep”
• Tired Dad Writes a New Book for Parents: GO THE F*** TO SLEEP

Here’s some testimonials for the book:

“Total genius.”
–Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn, father of two

“A children’s book for grown-ups! I really did laugh out loud–hilarious!”
–David Byrne, musician, father of one

“I wish this book had been around during my daughter’s overly protracted sleep rituals! Finally, someone tells it like it really is. This is no-guilt funny and a godsend!”
–Cristina Garcia, author of The Lady Matador’s Hotel, mother of one

“This is the most honest children’s book ever written. And it’s f*cking hilarious.”
–A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically, father of three

“Go the Fuck to Sleep is the secret anthem of tired parents everywhere. Adam Mansbach’s homage to the tropes of bedtime stories is pitch perfect, and Ricardo Cortes’s stunning illustrations will keep grown-ups and kids alike returning to these pages again and again!”
–Bliss Boyard, author of One Drop: My Father’s Hidden Life

If you’re an artist, graphic designer, graphic artist, or closet drawer, please enter the Flink12 art competition.

I am in the talk by Len Edgerly, “Paging Ahead: Tips & Tools for E-Book Mastery” as I finalize hiring an editor to start writing books about what I know about social media, new media strategies, digital PR, blogger outreach, blogging, online corporate branding, social media marketing, and the rest.

As well as everything that my company knows, Abraham Harrison LLC, including Phillip Rhoades, Mark Harrison, Dan Krueger, Rodrigo Martucci, Sara Wilson, and the entire team.

And I wonder: eBook AND print book? Ebook only? Open source? DRM? Amazong Kindle exclusive? Epub? Taking an entire book apart into vertical chapters and selling the ebook chapter-by-chapter like they sell tracks off of CDs and would a publisher like St. Martin’s Press allow that sort of content selling?

I am pretty amazed by all of that.

I hope that Len discusses the business behind getting something to market and how.

Back in July of 2009 I wrote about Scitable for AdAge Digital, A New Model for Digital Publishing … From an Academic Journal?, and have so much to tell you about it — and I am driving Ed Zitron crazy to write the follow-up article — but I have been so busy that I have not had the time.  So, to throw this amazing company a bone, here’s their latest news:  Nature Education’s Scitable Launches Mobile Version to Broaden Global Access to Science Information

Cambridge, MA – August 25, 2010 – Nature Education, the educational wing of global science publisher Nature Publishing Group, today announced the launch of the mobile version of the open-access science library Scitable. Scitable’s free library of scientist-authored overviews of key concepts in the life sciences is now accessible to users on a broad range of mobile devices, including the iPad, Android, Blackberry, and basic feature phones.

“Our mission is to democratize access to science education” said Vikram Savkar, SVP & Publishing Director at Nature Publishing Group. “Through our website, we’ve grown to reach more than 500,000 life science students in 165 countries. However, we’ve been working to find a way to put our high quality content library in the hands of the millions of students throughout the developing world who don’t have consistent access to personal computers or broadband.  With the launch of our mobile site, any student with a cell phone, even a very basic device, has access to a simplified version of the site that includes a wealth of quality, citable information. At the same time, students in the U.S. and similar countries who have feature-rich smartphones or iPads will have access to a more robust version of Scitable, with full video/audio capabilities, built-in glossary, and in some cases full ability to network with thousands of researchers and fellow students.”

Scitable, launched in 2009, combines a library of science education resources in the life sciences with classroom management tools and a collaborative community of scientists, instructors, and students.

For more information about Scitable, visit http://www.nature.com/scitable.

About Nature Education
Nature Education, the educational division of Nature Publishing Group, is dedicated to developing innovative science education resources for undergraduate and high school science students and faculty.

About Nature Publishing Group
Nature Publishing Group (NPG) is a publisher of high impact scientific and medical information in print and online. NPG publishes journals, online databases, and services across the life, physical, chemical, and applied sciences and clinical medicine, including Nature (founded in 1869), the leading weekly, international scientific journal, and Scientific American, the oldest continuously published magazine in the US and the leading authoritative publication for science in the general media. Online, nature.com provides over 5 million visitors per month with access to NPG publications and online databases and services. Part of Macmillan Publishers Limited, NPG is a global company with principal offices in London, New York, and Tokyo, and offices in cities worldwide including Boston, Buenos Aires, Delhi, Hong Kong, Madrid, Barcelona, Munich, Heidelberg, Basingstoke, Melbourne, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, and Washington DC. For more information, visit www.nature.com.

Anyway, I still want to write that article — and plan to — so to Ed Zitron and Vikram Savkar, bear with me — your platform and mission and your vision are so admirable that I can’t just dash it out.

Hopefully I will have the time to spend more time with the notes and emails and the press releases you have sent me and I will be able to convince other people why I believe Scitable is such an amazing, essential, and game-changing venture for the future of science education — and a model for all forms of education, an exemplar for the future of teaching.

Effie Kapsalis helped make something very very cool. Something brilliant, actually. Something you need to check out: Anthologize.

A brilliant idea is defined by how hard you slap yourself in the forehead, saying, “gee, that’s awesome — but so obvious, why didn’t I think of that?”  Anthologize is that simple, elegant, “it never occurred to me” idea that I have been waiting for forever: a WYSIWYG way of drag-and-dropping together a linear narrative out of what is often an amalgam of reverse-chronological, jumbled-together, blog posts. And export it into an online, web-accessible “book” or even a proper eBook in the PDF, ePUB, or TEI format that can be exported and popped into your favorite eBook reader like the Amazon Kindle or Sony eReader.

This brilliant-but-simple-idea-that-never-even-occurred-to-me had a gestation period of one week and is called Anthologize and presents itself as a free, easy-to-install, and easy-to-grok wordpress plug-in.

Anthologize is a project of One Week | One Tool a project of the Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. © 2010, Center for History and New Media. For more information, contact infoATanthologizeDOTorg. Follow @anthologize.

While I have already installed it into both Chris Abraham and Marketing Conversation, I am overwhelmed with how many posts there are on both blogs that I have yet to organize my thoughts and do something with it.  However, there has been quite a bit of press on the Anthologize project already.

Digital Campus

In our first-ever live broadcast, Digital Campus hosts the big reveal of what came out of One Week | One Tool, a National Endowment for the Humanities-sponsored institute at the Center for History and New Media that brought together a diverse group of developers and scholars to produce a useful software application for the humanities (and beyond) in just one week. Joining the regulars on the podcast are four members of the One Week team, Boone Gorges, Kathie Gossett, Effie Kapsalis, and Steve Ramsay. The tool revealed, Anthologize, is a WordPress-based platform for book publishing. Regular Mills Kelly finds Anthologize as beautiful as his Hawaiian vacation. (Download the .mp3)

Smithsonian 2.0

And you can now see and experiment with what we built, Anthologize.  It’s not a tool with a big scope – it does one thing well (although it is an alpha, so there are known issues). It enables researchers, curators, writers – and bloggers in general – to compile, edit, and publish anything available through RSS feeds. From Anthologize, you can send out your compile work as an eBook, paper publication, or TEI (an open XML format for storage and exchange).

ReadWriteWeb

Anthologize enables anyone working with WordPress to easily publish their content in a variety of book formats, including PDF, ePUB, and TEI, an open XML format. Anthologize can handle WordPress blog content as well as feeds from other sources, allowing these items to be updated, reordered, and edited, and then exported.

Blogging has become an increasingly important tool for scholars and educators to share their ideas, but once blogged, that’s often the end-of-the-line for that writing. Anthologize organizes this content and enables users to publish and distribute their work in additional ways – via print or e-readers.

BBC Tech Brief

Tim Carmody at Snarkmarket reports on the success of “one week I one tool”, in which a group at the US Center for Digital Humanity spent a week designing and building a digital tool from scratch.

They posted teasers about the project online but did not reveal the result of their work until the seven days were up:

“They put together a great open-source tool: Anthol­o­gize, a Word­Press plu­gin that helps you take online con­tent like blog posts and col­lect, edit, design, and for­mat them into a book — for either dig­i­tal or print. Solid soft­ware, with obvi­ous util­ity for lots of peo­ple, not just aca­d­e­mics.”

And it’s open source too – which makes it a free for all. Bookbinding is certainly a lot less fiddly these days…

The Atlantic

Anthologize is a WordPress plugin that allows scholars, conference organizers, and bloggers to create eBooks out of websites. Its creators imagine it could be used by researchers to “sketch ideas, collaborate with co-authors, edit and develop research notes into arguments, publish conference proceedings, and engage in public scholarly communication without the typical barriers.” Or perhaps teachers will turn their class blogs into custom publications.

So, what separates Anthologize from commercial blog-to-book services like Blurb or Lulu? (Both fantastic services, IMHO.) First, it’s a WordPress plugin, so if you’re familiar with that tool (as many are), it should be easy to manipulate.

“Because it’s open source, third-party developers can create translators and importers for other formats as well, and contribute them back,” added Doug Knox, director of publication and digital initiatives at the Newberry Library, and part of the One Week, One Tool team. “Lulu and Blurb — and others like FastPencil — are focused on commercial blog-to-book publishing. They don’t have as much flexibility in importing existing content, and they aren’t as open to extending the range of output formats.”

This was all the result of the One Week One Tool project and, to be honest, shows that Rapid Application Development can be the start of a true gift and a true legacy to the world of coding, open source, and online publishing and personal publishing empowerment.

I received a nice note from my friend Michelle Wolverton @chelpixie asking me if I would share the new novel from J.C. Hutchins with you today, the day it launches. So, please check out 7th Son — you can check out the PDF of 7th Son: Descent “SPECIAL EDITION” here — chapter 1-10 of the novel, exclusive to my readers!  Oh, and you can buy 7th Son: Descent from Amazon right now.

Here’s his story:

Novel by J.C. Hutchins

For two years, J.C. chased publishers the traditional way. Unable to find a literary agent to represent his human cloning thriller — but convinced his novels were worthy of an audience — he took to the “podwaves” in 2006 and released the 7th Son trilogy as free serialized podcast audiobooks. A thriving community soon formed around J.C. and his fiction. By 2007, it was 40,000 members strong.In ‘07, J.C. asked St. Martin’s Press to consider 7th Son for publication. The publisher saw the thriving grassroots platform J.C. had created, and accepted. Nearly seven years to the day of writing the novel’s opening lines — The president of the United States is dead. He was murdered in the morning sunlight by a four-year-old boy… — the first book in the trilogy will be released on Oct. 27.  (Personally, that line hooked me as a true fan forever.)

J.C. is a real-deal, dirt-under-the-fingernails DIY / social media success story. To celebrate the book’s release, he is rolling out an ambitious, content-fueled promotional campaign, including free fiction, and serialization of the book at “Top 5” blog BoingBoing.net.

Here’s some more information for you about the novel, 7th Son, Descent:

As America reels from the bizarre presidential assassination committed by a child, seven men are abducted from their normal lives and delivered to a secret government facility. Each man has his own career, his own specialty. All are identical in appearance. The seven strangers were grown — unwitting human clones — as part of a project called 7th Son.

The government now wants something from these “John Michael Smiths.” They share the flesh and implanted memories of the psychopath responsible for the president’s murder. The killer has bigger plans, and only these seven have the unique qualifications to track and stop him.

But when their progenitor makes the battle personal, it becomes clear he knows the seven better than they know themselves…

Learn more about 7th Son: Descent.

I was very impressed, obviously, about the direction that the gang from Nature took when they launched Scitable: A New Model for Digital Publishing … From an Academic Journal?Why This Blogger’s Excited About Scitable in AdAge DigitalNext:

A couple of months ago I attended a discussion at the National Press Club titled “What Will We Tell Peoria?” during which a panel of journalists complained that people have become too stupid to realize how essential traditional methods of reporting are and how we’ll all be sorry when rigorous newsrooms close and papers die and only TMZ is left standing.

I think that is rubbish. In my work, I believe it is essential to give the gift that people want and not the gift you think they should have. Newspaper magnates are indignantly trying to force feed us their content believing their version of civics is the inoculate we need to prevent us from becoming vile Yahoos.

I believed that papers needed to convert their devoted readership into a devoted community — transitioning one-way print and broadcasting into conversation and sharing. There are almost no good examples of this.

At least that’s what I thought before I received an e-mail from Vikram Savkar, publishing director of Scitable, asking if I might have time to jump on the phone with him to talk about his science social network. “Good Lord, not another social-networking service,” I thought.

Well, Scitable is a product of the journal Nature, a respected, peer-reviewed academic journal. Its goal is to offer free scientific knowledge to students, starting with genetics, as well as facilitating the connection between students and senior scientists as mentors, something that is much easier to make happen online.

Mr. Savkar realized that there is a lot of crap, misinformation, outdated info and rubbish online, especially in science. Even the content that is legit is neither guided nor contextual. And content without context is hard to digest. When I think of dodgy content that does a pretty good job of informing but is not cite-worthy, I think of Wikipedia.

Scitable is a direct response to Wikipedia. While Wikipedia a great tool for generalists, faculty of science know that it is not a definitive source. The first goal Mr. Savkar set was to make sure Scitable was as easy to use as Wikipedia while approaching all the content through rigorous editorial processes and review.

I asked Vikram if you could access all of the content on Scitable without ever needing to log in, something that many community developers do to encourage registration, and he told me that locking down the content would have been antithetical to the open-access model for content. When someone searches for “Gene Expression and Regulation,” Vikram wants students to find the article on Scitable instead of on Wikipedia.

When students and scientists and professors and teachers do register, they are granted some very cool tools to message, bookmark and submit content to the conversation, “Upload Original Content,” which I assume is then placed under the spotlight, making sure it is edited and vetted.

If you haven’t heard about the journal Nature, it is part of the Nature Publishing Group, which has been publishing since 1869 and covers 70 science and medical journals — surely the type of company most likely to fail in this mainstream media-killing economy. That’s why I was so excited about this call — over an hour long — and why I am sharing it here. Scitable is game-changing — they’re doing what all of the ivory-tower walking dead refuse to do: evolve or perish. I personally don’t think it is very noble to go down with the ship when hitting the iceberg is completely preventable.

The reason why Scitable is starting with genetics is because genetics is sexy right now. According to the press info, “Now that President Obama has lifted the ban on stem-cell research, genetics has become a hot topic for students, teachers and scientists. There are few credible resources and brands online that students can easily access and trust.” A good enough reason.

Another reason is because genetics research is pretty clean and easy, accessible to newbies and beginners. In D.C., the land of the genome, I attended some classes on the programming language Perl, a simple-to-learn language that is known for its ability to churn through large amounts of data — and text — to find patterns and allow “normal people” to mine for genetic findings, something that very well could encourage students to choose science and medicine as their vocation.

One cool tool that Scitable has created to encourage students to pursue science is called Learning Paths, guided lessons that walk students through an entire course on subjects as awesomely arcane as “Chromatin in eukaryotic regulation,” “Gene Mapping: Then and Now,” “A Brief History of Genetics: Defining Experiments in Genetics” and “Intro Biotechnology: Techniques and Applications.” Each of these Learning Paths is developed by an educator who has worked very hard to not throw the student unto the deep end to sink or swim but rather to assist in that student’s autodidactic journey. For example, “Chromatin in eukaryotic regulation” was put together by Laura Hoopes. Learning paths allow people to have a streamlined experience, sort of like a mentorship or training program, to break down all of these sundry tools and resources into an easy, accessible learning experience.

Finally, the future of Scitable. Savkar addressed the movement past genetics. Scitable has been designed to scale without breaking or becoming impenetrable. In fact, the bigger Scitable grows, the better. There are no walls between the disciplines in order to be sure there is no siloing going on, and that allows the hyper-textual site content to interact and allow serendipity and coincidence to act out and to allow students to see the connections and the connectivity among all things, something that is too often prevented in the competitive environment of the university.

The plan is to be profitable in five years, by selling advertising through the site. The sponsors must contribute to the site — there will be no advertisements for products. I am envisioning ads that highlight, say, internships at labs, educational programs or jobs at bio-pharmaceutical companies.

In our busy ADHD world, I know I need executive summaries of the web and of knowledge. Scitable is trying really hard to dig through all of human knowledge and be able to sift all of the content, boil it all down into understandable and trustworthy bits that students and adults alike can fit into their busy lives in a compelling and exciting way without freaking students out or intimidating them out of ever wanting to enter the sciences in college; 40% of students leave the sciences in colleges, often because of an attrition culture in the academy.

To me, Scitable is an elegant interpretation of both “publish or perish” and “evolve or perish,” and I believe it’s an exemplary model for how stodgy old journals and boring dead-tree newspapers might be able to survive these internet “anti-intellectual” dark ages. Maybe this is a map that more publishers should consider following.

~ ~ ~
Chris Abraham, president of the digital-PR firm Abraham Harrison, is a blogger who specializes in social-media marketing with a focus on blogger outreach, blogger engagement and search-reputation management. Chris lives in Berlin and Washington and can be reached via Twitter, Facebook or e-mail.

Taylor Donlan (hire him), employee number one at Abraham Harrison LLC, emeritus, started our hallowed tradition of ensuring our clients provided us with a worthwhile gift to our bloggers,  be it embargoed news, exclusive content, newsworthiness, humor, a perfect fit, or even a $2 off coupon in the case of Snuggle Creme — and if you’re honest, is it entertaining?

When all is said and done, earned media blogger PR doesn’t cut it unless bloggers are willing to take up the cause and blog about our clients. We’re not a paid placement company like some and we can’t make anyone do anything, especially bloggers who are the epitome of cat herding.  They need to choose us, we can’t just tap them.

When we have a kick-off meeting about a new client, we always carefully consider whether what the client has to offer is compelling enough to actually earn coverage online — and they oftentimes don’t make the grade.

In fact, we recently went through this ourselves and we discovered that this needed to become a collaborative litmus test: Dan didn’t think the US Investment in Africa Study had any legs because it was academic but Mark and I knew there were lots of other Foreign Affair wonks like us in the blogosphere; Mark and I didn’t think bloggers would want to blog about Snuggle Fabric softener, but Dan knew he had a star on his hands and the metrics proved true: more earned media blog posts and tweets ever in our history, to date!

In fact, we have done a lot of thinking about this:

• Activating Bloggers
• Always Bring Something to the Party
• Blog Community Outreach
• Gift and Asset Distribution
• When in Rome Do As the Romans Do

Why am I on about this this morning?  Well, my friend Sally Falkow did it again in the form of her latest blog post Online Success is About Telling Stories:

Every business is now a publisher, said Vaynerchuk.  The right content is the key to engagement. But you have to figure out what content will fill a need for your audience.  It’s about providing information, being useful and being entertaining.

[...]

It’s vital to be listening to your audience and responding with content that makes sense and offers value.  The major shift in media consumption, and the low barrier to entry for publishing online, make it possible for anyone and everyone to create content.

[...]

Success online is about telling stories and producing great content. The right content creates engagement.  Engagement creates loyal followers and customers.

So true.

In order to be compelling enough to attract bloggers to blog about you or your clients, you must be appealing, you must be attractive, and you must be willing and able to tell your story, share your process, and tease out your narrative.

Our favorite clients thinks about this quite a lot — the best clients to work with generally already get “entertaining:” advertising agencies and content companies.

At the end of the day, if we are handed a nothing burger by our client, it is off to the drawing board to develop the story, to explore a narrative, to ask the right questions and prospect the right bloggers and self-selected interest groups.

Sometimes, even with the best narrative ever and the most generous gifts, you wind up with a nothing burger with nothing sauce and you sit back and scratch your head.  What we have discovered over time is that these sorts of failures often have to do with targeting, messaging, or oftentimes both.

This happened to us recently as well.  Perfect gift, great story, excellent narrative, the whole nine yards; however, we were reaching out to Central and South America in Spanish and Portuguese.  Well, Latin America hated our messaging for cultural reasons.  In many Spanish-speaking countries, young, successful, wealthy entrepreneurs are considered villians instead of being heroes, a very American view.

We didn’t need to change our gift, we just needed to change our angle of attack which came down to our messaging, our pitch, and a couple-few adjustments to our Social Media News Release and that did the trick!  It was cultural!

Via Marketing Conversation